Just checked out new cdrama "My Daughter"
As you can probably tell from the picture above, My Daughter (夏家三千金) is mostly about the lives of three girls, but admittedly the drama's main draw (for me, at least) is Baron Chen. I picspammed him a while ago, but unfortunately TinyPic is a butt and reduced the quality on all of their images. :( Oh well, not much I can do about it.
Anyway, the first two episodes of this came out recently, so of course I checked it out. The first half of episode one was exaggeratedly ridiculous, with sound and video effects more suited to a variety show, but afterward it improved considerably.
The general storyline revolves around the rich Xia family, which consists of Daddy Xia (Xia Zhengsong), Mommy Xia (Yu Jing), and their two daughters (Xia Youshan and Xia Tianmei). Older sister is played by Qi Wei (aka Ou Chen's fake girlfriend from Summer's Desire), while younger sister is played by the immensely gorgeous Tiffany Tang Yan (although her character is supposed to be sort of spazzy here -- she's still cute, though). Daddy, Mommy, and big sister always appear in their company's ads together, so they're pretty famous. Hardly anyone knows about Tianmei, though, because she doesn't appear in the ads and because she doesn't like to spread the news that she's from this rich family.
The happy (for now) Xia family: (L-R) Xia Youshan, Yu Jing, Xia Zhengsong, Xia Tianmei
On the other side of the economic spectrum is Yang Zhenzhen, played by Zhang Meng. She's your typical poor-but-sweet heroine, and is also lucky because her boyfriend is Baron Chen, who plays Zhong Haotian, who does architecture work for the Xia family. Zhenzhen is also into architecture but can't pursue this dream because she has to stay home and help out her mother.
Where these two stories connect is that Zhenzhen is actually Xia Zhengsong's daughter, except of course he doesn't know that. Zhenzhen's mother (whom twdrama fans will recognize as Ren Guangxi's mom from Autumn's Concerto) has never told her daughter about this, and the only people who know are her and her good friend.
Making things even more confusing is that Xia Youshan, the older sister, is apparently not Xia Zhengsong's real daughter. This hasn't been thoroughly explained yet, so all you have to know for now is that Daddy Xia has three daughters, but doesn't know about one (Zhenzhen), knows that one isn't his (Youshan), and sees only one as really his (Tianmei).
Anyway. Despite all these family issues, everyone knows that any good drama must have some good love stories in it. My Daughter has two.
The first involves Tianmei and a manager/CEO called "Yan Ge." (This is funny because "yan ge" means "strict," and it's the exact same characters too.) Yan Ge is played by Roy Chiu, and of course this couple gets off to a happy start. By a happy start, I mean Tianmei accidentally pours coffee on Yan Ge not once, but twice. Luckily, Tianmei has gotten the favor of Yan Ge's grandmother, so she doesn't get killed or sued or worse.
Grandma tells us that she named her grandson "Yan Ge" in the hopes that he would embody the saying "格物致知" (to investigate things is to attain knowledge). He does seem like a smart guy, but he's also the tortured soul in this drama, and is seen agonizing over his girlfriend from three years ago, who left him or something.
Typical rich CEO/doted-on grandson.
The second love story is a triangle between Haotian, Zhenzhen, and Youshan. Haotian and Zhenzhen grew up together (Zhenzhen's mom is Haotian's godmother), and Zhenzhen also helped to pay for his overseas education, so they are a tight-knit couple. However, Haotian's mother objects to their relationship and keeps trying to push Haotian and Youshan together, because she wants her son to marry into a rich family.
We eventually learn that Haotian once helped Youshan when they were younger (she used to have a cleft lip, before she got surgery for it, and other kids would laugh at her because of it) -- an extremely lame plot gimmick, but whatever. Once Youshan learns about this and re-meets Haotian, she starts to fall for him, although she tries to keep it under wraps because she's not sure about his feelings for her.
In the first episode, we also get a meeting between Xia Zhengsong and his real-but-he-doesn't-know-it daughter, Zhenzhen. She's inspecting one of the designs for the Xia family's new houses (the family sells houses or apartments or something), and when he asks her what she thinks, she tells him that she likes the design but thinks it could be more environmentally friendly. Her ideas impress Zhengsong, and she asks to take a picture with him, to which he agrees.
Final Verdict: I love family dramas more than romance dramas, so this one is definitely a keeper for me. It's a bit hefty at an expected 80 episodes, but if I manage to keep up with the new episodes, it shouldn't be too bad.
Interestingly enough, the other family drama I'm watching -- Morning Glory -- is also about a family whose surname is Xia, but their circumstances are quite, quite different.